2010: A look back at art

‘‘Out with the old, in with the new” is a year-round motto when it comes to art, for which the only alternative to change is stagnation. Still, 2010 gave Houston art fans much to remember fondly, so let’s do so now before clearing the decks for 2011.

It was a picture-perfect year for American portraits as Barkley L. Hendricks’ long overdue paintings survey wrapped up a five-city tour at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and a career-spanning selection of the best of Alice Neel’s haunting psychological portraits was presented at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Inman Gallery got in on the act with do i know you, a wide-ranging snapshot of contemporary portraiture that filled two galleries while showing how the genre has expanded. Houston’s Nestor Topchy had a triumphant one-night-only show of Byzantine-style portraits of art-world notables at Geo. H. Lewis & Sons Funeral Directors.

In the realm of ancient portraiture, the MFAH was the first U.S. stop for a touring exhibit of copper, terra-cotta and stone sculptures from the ancient Nigerian city-state of Ife that displayed a level of sophistication and realism we normally associate with the European Renaissance.

FotoFest truly rocked its 2010 biennial, which was devoted to contemporary U.S. photography, with a strong lineup of official exhibits, the best of which, Whatever Was Splendid, explored the long, wide shadow Walker Evans has cast on the field — just as the nation struggled to emerge from the worst recession since the period depicted in Evans’ seminal 1938 book, American Photographs. Standouts among the more than 100 affiliated shows included Allison Hunter’s site-specific video installation Zoosphere at DiverseWorks.

Young curators came on strong. MFAH assistant photography curator Yasufumi Nakamori gave us two great photo shows with the astonishing Ruptures and Continuities: Photography Made After 1960 From the MFAH Collection and Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro. The latter exhibit and catalog highlighted similarities between modernist aesthetics and the building styles in a 17th-century Kyoto villa and, for the first time, presented the 1950s photos as Ishimoto meant for them to be seen.

Menil Collection associate curator Michelle White also scored a twofer with a strong show of work by luminaries of the 1960s Los Angeles “Cool School” and a surprisingly accessible look at the avant-garde Nouveau Réalisme movement, also of the 1960s. So did MFAH assistant prints and drawings curator Dena Woodall with top-drawer selections of both German Impressionist and Paris-based Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works on paper. (The former was a companion show to an equally revelatory show of German Impressionist landscape paintings.)

At the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, another young curator, Timothy Gonzalez, made his debut with Because We Are, a timely, riveting group show of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender artists whose work was at turns humorous, elegiac, angry, sexy, poignant, introspective and in-your-face.

Among more seasoned curatorial hands, CAMH’s Valerie Cassel Oliver had the best year, coordinating the Houston stop of the Hendricks survey, mounting a show exploring connections between craft and performance and giving Fluxus artist Benjamin Patterson his first retrospective.

Public art highlights included Bernar Venet’s outdoor sculpture exhibit in Hermann Park and the completion of Dennis Oppenheim’s Radiant Fountains at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Indoors, Rice University Art Gallery made itself over constantly with terrific installations by three wildly different artists: El Anatsui, Andrea Dezsö and Sarah Oppenheimer. And the Menil presented the U.S. debut of a 1983 reconstruction of a room of the Merzbau, German, modernist Kurt Schwitters’ pioneering walk-in sculpture — a forerunner of installation art.

Perhaps the highest note of all was the MFAH opening its Arts of China Gallery shortly after artist Cai Guo-Qiang completed his largest-ever U.S. museum drawing — created using exploding gunpowder in a live performance in a Houston warehouse — to line the gallery walls, creating a contemporary crucible for the ancient objects.

The Cai commission was the self-described “crazy idea” of longtime MFAH director Peter C. Marzio, whose death on Dec. 9 was as heartbreaking as his example was inspiring. Marzio’s legacy will long outlast the 28 years he devoted to the city’s cultural landscape.